Time Calculator In PHP

18th June 2008 - 1 minute read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and I will endeavour to correct.

Use the following function to work out how long it has been since an event in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

function getAge($year,$month,$day,$hour=0,$minute=0,$second=0){
 $age = mktime($hour,$minute,$second,$month,$day,$year);
 $age = time()-$age;
 return array('years'=>$age/60/60/24/365,
  'months'=>$age/60/60/24/12,
  'weeks'=>$age/60/60/24/7,
  'days'=>$age/60/60/24,
  'hours'=>$age/60/60,
  'minutes'=>$age/60,
  'seconds'=>$age);
}

The practical use of this function is that you can work out how old someone is from their birthday. Here is an example of the function in use.

// someone's birthday
echo '<pre>'.print_r(getAge(1984,10,4),true).'</pre>';

Which would output the following:

Array
(
 [years] => 23.721673198884
 [months] => 721.53422646605
 [weeks] => 1236.9158167989
 [days] => 8658.4107175926
 [hours] => 207801.85722222
 [minutes] => 12468111.433333
 [seconds] => 748086686
)

Any function like this can be tested by putting in the current time, if you get zero across the board then the function works.

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